NetSuite Magazine

Today’s analytic tools put power into the hands of retailers
By Southard Jones

San Mateo, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/07/2014 -- From the smallest boutique to a hundred-billion-dollar big box store, the retail industry represents more than $4 trillion in sales and hundreds of thousands of online and offline businesses. Burdened with bare-bones margins, retailers have for years leveraged data and analytic tools to survive in a competitive environment. Here are five tips to help you win sales by better understanding your customer using data analysis and business intelligence (BI) software tools.

Data is like a natural resource—you must tap and refine it to make it useful.

The retail industry runs on data. To operate a store successfully, a manager needs, among other things, to know the store’s target customers, demographics, and neighborhood competitors; be able to adjust prices swiftly to balance inventory and gross profit; and order the right products in the right quantities. Online retail business is even more data-centric; retailers must know customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, and customer shopping attributes.